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For Ricoh, the move broadens its services footprint in the U.S. As for Best Buy, the sale of MindShift allows it to focus more on its core business.

Best Buy acquired MindShift in 2011 for $167 million. The plan at the time was to use MindShift to break into cloud services and target more SMBs. With MindShift, Best Buy was hoping to bolster its services business and give SMBs a trade-up opportunity from Geek Squad and Best Buy for Business.

MindShift is most likely a better fit for Ricoh, which has been beefing up its services division. MindShift brings 6,900 customers to Ricoh, which already has a services unit with 8,000 specialists.

With the MindShift purchase, Ricoh also gets expertise in industries such as legal, healthcare, financial services, education and non-profits. MindShift will keep its name, 650 employees and offices.

Larry Dignan is Editor in Chief of ZDNet and SmartPlanet as well as Editorial Director of ZDNet's sister site TechRepublic. He was most recently Executive Editor of News and Blogs at ZDNet. Prior to that he was executive news editor at eWeek and news editor at Baseline. He also served as the East Coast news editor and finance editor at CN...
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